Valentines From Bath: A Bluestocking Belles Collection by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1091064954
Amazon: B07MP7WV4T
Published: 2019-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

Eric instructed the housekeeper and her husband, who was man-of-all work for Eastwood Hall, to tell no one he was in residence. He needed time to come to terms with his history here, and all that had happened since, before he could begin to face the inevitable callers. Nothing short of a full-on assault by the marriage makers of the ton, his mother at their head, could have driven him to the manor that had been his childhood prison. The impact of the place was even more powerful than he’d expected.

He spent the morning wandering the shrouded rooms, lifting a dustcover here and there to confirm nothing had been moved since the day he was taken from this place, leaving behind the only two people who had ever loved him.

Ugo, the mountain shepherd dog he had rescued from an Italian river as a puppy, padded at his heels or took station next to a door watching anxiously as he explored yet another room. Not just the nursery and schoolroom wing where he’d spent most of his childhood, but the reception rooms that had seldom been used and even the bedchambers where the Countess of Wayford and her sons, the young Lord Osric and his brother Ulric, had stayed on their rare inspection tours.

Lady Wayford’s rooms seemed empty. Had she taken away furniture and fittings when his exile meant she no longer need visit him here? At some intellectual level, he could concede she probably hated Eastwood Hall almost as much as he did. Indeed, he counted on that when he chose it as his refuge from her determination to see him wed to one of her protégées. But since her distaste was founded on the repugnance she felt for him, he would not spare her his sympathy.

At the window to the countess’s balcony, Ugo whined to go out. “A bit of a jump down to the garden, boy,” Eric told him. “And you won’t like the rain.” But when he looked over the dog into the garden, the clouds had split to allow the sun to shine through.

Fair enough, then. Ugo would have his walk, and Eric, too, would welcome leaving this mausoleum for a while. “I have a place I’d like to show you, Ugo,” he said. “The place we used to meet. Come on.”

He led the dog downstairs and out across the overgrown front lawn to the woods. Yes. He would go to the folly.

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